What is MailWatch?

Function

This screensaver module tells me at a glance whether I (or my officemates) have E-mail waiting on the spool directory.  This avoids a lot of spurious "Excuse me, could you scoot over for a second so I can check my E-mail," and hence, increases productivity.

In keeping with the information theme, it also can provide the time, day, and date.

The real usefulness comes through when MailWatch is combined with Christopher Lane's SpaceSaver.bundle.  This add-on bundle for NeXTstep's loginwindow.app enables you to run your favorite BackSpace modules over the loginwindow.
	
Form

The words bounce around like particles in a box.  When two names collide, they recoil as if they were point particles located at the geometric centers of the names.   The mass of each name is proportional to the screen area it occupies.  All collisions are inelastic, so energy and momentum are conserved.  The interactions are hence completely determined by the unique simultaneous solution of:

				¬
and

¬.

Periodically, MailWatch compares the list of names with the contents of the mail spooling directory.  When a user has unread E-mail, the username changes font and color.  On color systems, the color of the name varies from red to blue as the size of the E-mail grows from 0  KB to 100 KB.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sam Streeper for BackSpace.app.  Thanks to Christopher Lane for SpaceSaver.bundle.  Thanks to NeXT, Inc.  for the generous academic discounts which have kept me in NeXTstep.